Drunky, pull up a chair and rant a while.
No. I’m ok. Just anxiety attacks sometimes.
I did about that issue here.
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=21011750&postcount=112
Glad to hear it. Thank you for relieving my anxiety some.
Sorry your brain is being a jerk. I’ve had that, and I inherited it from my father, who inherited it from his mom…it’s well-known these days and not uncommon. So I hope you’re not suffering in silence.
No, my mom and grandma have them too so when they started we compared notes about how it feels and what to do to try and calm down.
Thanks for all the concern.
Seems a new young lady has found her way here. Welcome, lilmiss!
Thank you Sunny Daze for this thread.
I’m a lurker and I’m female. I have hardly ever posted, but I’ve been reading here for years. I enjoy it very much. But I have left many times in disgust.
Most recent example:
A few weeks ago ThemlaLou posted a pit thread about incels. I was all set to read what intelligent people had to say on this issue. The thread quickly became about awkward, lonely guys who get virgin-shamed. Ugh. There couldn’t be a better example of WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ??? :smack:
A few posters kept coming in pointing out that the thread was about incels who hate women and “status” men because women won’t have sex with them. But on and on it went about how no one thinks about the poor men who can’t get dates.
I left in utter disgust. I’m someone who won’t bother to post because I see that otherwise well respected, long time posters get ignored and disrespected. That thread was bullshit.
I have nothing against awkward guys who have a difficult time with dating, but they should have started another thread. That thread was not about them.
So you can count me as someone the OP is referring to who will just choose to go away instead of deal with this.
There are countless examples. It’s not about a few bad posters or a few bad threads - it’s a pervasive, general attitude.
I apologize for getting here late, but like I said, I left for a while and had to catch up on this thread. And I admit to skimming the last few pages.
I can see that, but I’m not sure how to fix that. As I said in that thread, I made the mistake of thinking that the OP was “[I want to understand] why are incels so angry?”, but it was only through towards the end of the thread that I realized that the actual meaning was “[I don’t want to understand] why are incels so angry?” It was a misunderstanding on my part, and maybe also on the part of other people who thought that the thread was a request for information, rather than just to rant about things that upset them that they have no desire to understand.
Under that impression, I did think that showing what steps led to the radicalization of lonely awkward men into more extreme positions would be productive, but perspectives from men (and women) who had struggled with similar things that incels had were dismissed as inconsequential personal issues, and it was explained that those struggles and perspectives were not important to the goal of complaining about the end result of the failures of those struggles.
As far as posters being disrespected and ignored, well that happens to all posters on all topics around here, especially in the pit.
You read a thread about incels and are upset that the discussion was about incels? What do think that thread should have been about?
I think the point is that the thread was clearly supposed to be about the self-identified openly misogynistic “incel movement”, and various jackasses kept trying to focus it instead on their preferred interpretation of “incel” as “awkward but basically decent guy who can’t get a date, poor guy, isn’t that a pity, shouldn’t something be done about that”.
If someone is talking about Al Qaeda, one of the interesting questions to ask is, what do folks look like before they join Al Qaeda, and what can be done to divert them from joining, and how can the emotional/spiritual needs that Al Qaeda is meeting for these folks be met in a different way?
That is, to me, a much more interesting discussion than a simple discussion of how terrible Al Qaeda is. Everyone KNOWS how terrible Al Qaeda is, what more is there to say on that subject?
When I saw the incel thread, I approached it in much the same way as I’d approach a thread about al Qaeda, or AtomWaffen, or the Klan. Perhaps that was a mistake–perhaps we’ve not culturally concluded that incel is as bad as those other organizations, and we need to hit that point before we can have a productive discussion about diverting potential members from joining up?
(edit: clear distinction to draw between “potential incel” and “self-described incel”, just as you’d draw the same distinction for “potential Al Qaeda” and “self-described Al Qaeda”)
Sure. But if the people stroking their chins over the vulnerability of potential al-Qaeda recruits keep deliberately ignoring these recruits’ enthusiastic embrace of its rhetoric along the lines of “ALLAH WANTS ALL THE HATED INFIDELS TO DIE”, then ISTM they are shutting their eyes to a pretty crucial point of the discussion.
I think that may well be the case. As with a lot of other heinous terroristic crimes committed by angry white men, there’s still a fair bit of cultural impetus toward emphasizing their “troubled individual” status and downplaying the “social pathology” aspects of their mindset and crimes.
Fair enough on all counts. It’s infuriating that the incel attacks are not treated as obvious terrorism.
EXACTLY. Thank you.
No problem. This discussion is getting so civilized all around that I would like to retract my previous use of the epithet “jackasses” a few posts ago. (It felt a little daring even at the time but I said to myself “Oh come on, it’s the pit! Go for it!” And now I haz a guilt.)
I rag on you a lot, Leftie, but I think you nailed it. OK, incels are angry losers who can’t get laid. They suck. What else is there to say?
Regards,
Shodan
Goddammit, even when you think I’m right you can’t manage to paraphrase me accurately. No, that’s not what I said, I said they’re terrorists along the lines of Al Qaeda and the Klan, not that they’re just angry losers.
Are you wishing you’d waited like three minutes, though?
Um, how about, for example:
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In what ways does our culture treat women as somehow responsible for the emotional status and self-esteem of these “angry losers”?
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To what extent are these “angry losers” given a pass on a lot of their misogynistic rhetoric due to entrenched sexist attitudes in society?
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Why do we tend, as LHoD noted, to refer to these men dismissively as mere “angry losers” who “suck” rather than as “terrorists”?
That’s just a few off the top of my head. I think there’s actually quite a lot more to say about the “incel movement” as a societal phenomenon, if you want to hear it.
Heh. Nah.
THIS is the discussion I was hoping for in the original thread.
Also, there are many, many women who are socially awkward, who don’t date, but somehow THEY don’t espouse hatred and want to kill because of it. So why do so many men turn this into hatred and terrorism?
This is a great question, and I got thoughts, but am not sure if this is the place for it. Would it be worth either bumping that thread, or starting a new one with parameters in the OP excluding thoughts about how to divert folks from incel terrorism?